The War Between Us (1995)

This movie is a few years old and was a straight to tv production as far as I can tell. And seeing as how I can't seem to find it anywhere else, I would assume it was only on for those couple of runs that I saw it... but it was one of the best films on how the Japanese were treated in Canada during world war 2.

The story features 2 families, the Kawashima family and the Parnham family. When world war 2 took place, the Kawashima family was uprooted from their lovely home and successful business in Vancouver, British Columbia, and forced to move to a low-income mining town. This came as something of a shock to the family because though Mr. and Mrs. Kawashima were not born in Canada, their children were and Mr. Kawashima served in the Canadian army during world war 1. One of the very vibrant images I have of this film is watching the Japanese family move into this little shack of a house from the perspective of their neighbours, the Parnhams. The family is obviously wealthy. The women wearing fur coats and have fashionable hair and make up, the men in suits, the ornate furniture and belongings they have brought with them to their new home, and how all of this so obviously clashed with the poverty-stricken area, the dirt roads and floors, and even the shabbiness of the cart carrying their things.

The eldest daughter of the Japanese couple, Aya, ends up becoming a housekeeper for the Parnhams. Ed, the husband, is open- minded about their new neighbours, but his wife Peg is more skeptical and treats Aya like a maid. By the end of the movie though, Peg has warmed to Aya and she becomes one of Peg's closest friends. The Parhnams have a young daughter, Marg , and she is very curious about the new neighbours. She starts hanging around their house and asks her already nervous mother questions about what she sees there. She completely immerses herself in the culture of the new family and the other Japanese people there. By the end of the film the family discovers that the government sold their house and business without their consent, and to add to the insult they are to be deported back to Japan, even though they are Canadian citizens and their children have never been to Japan. The final scene in the movie has the Kawashima family in the back of a truck, being driven away and Marg running after them in a little Kimono.

This movie is a really good film, both in terms of its historical content as well as in terms of it just being a good film. The acting was well done and I could relate to all of the characters. I was probably in elementary school when I saw it, but I really enjoyed it and I think that the movie's ability to hold my attention and imprint itself in my memory says something about the storytelling.

I cannot find a movie cover for this anywhere, it's not on amazon or any other site I can find, so here is the imdb page http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114892/

Photographing Fairies (1997)

Photographing Fairies is a sci fi/ fantasy film set in the early 1900's exploring the idea behind the Cottingly fairy hoax. The story is about a young photographer named Charles Castle who looses his wife soon after they are married, and of course he is lost in his grief. He goes off to war and is employed as a photographer in the trenches, and after the war he is still consumed with death as we see him cut and paste photos of dead soldiers into new photos of their loved ones for a living. One day he finds himself at a supernatural convention of sorts and comes upon a lecture of a man telling people of the Cottingly photographs and supporting the existence of faeries because of them. Charles then proceeds to interrupt the man, telling him that there is no way the photos can be real, both from a photographers perspectives and as one who has lost faith with all things the eye cannot see. The character of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle makes an appearance in the film, as he was a supporter of the photos, even though he wasn't so supportive of them in the film. So, after attending the lecture, a woman comes to his studio and shows him some photographs that were supposedly of a real faerie standing on her daughter's outstretched hand. Of course Charles doesn't believe this any more than he believed the Cottingly story, but after closer inspection he finds that there is something not quite right about the photo and goes off to find the woman and ask her about it. The woman lives in the countryside with her husband, a pastor, their two daughters, and the governess for the girls. He finds the woman and tells her that he may believe her story, but she just smiles at him and tells him that the photograph doesn't matter anymore because she has seen them. The details after this point I will not go into because that is where the real mystery lies.

Charles struggles throughout the movie with his wife's death and cannot seem to get beyond the hold it has on him. Maybe because of this he has lost all faith in an after world or possibilities of another world within ours, until of course he goes in search of the faeries. When he does find a way to see them (whether or not he's hallucinating is debatable) he clings to this connection ferociously and uses this to try to get in touch with his wife. At the end he is somewhat set free of this, and embarks on an adventure of sorts.

This is not a film for children, or if a child does see it, it should be monitored by a parent. There is both nudity and death in the film, and though neither appear in excess, I would say this is a 14 and up movie.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

This book was very detailed. I read it after watching the movie, and learned more in the first few pages than I did from the entire film. This is a story about the life of a geisha and the complexities and potential heartbreak and constrictions that come with that distinction. We watch as a girl is first sold to a geisha house by her parents, and slowly molded into a geisha. The girl falls in love with a man, a much older man, and we witness her pain of not being able to be with him because of what she is.

I thought that though the author was very descriptive, but I wasn't compelled to immerse myself in the book. Sometimes I felt the author's writing style to be uncomfortably detailed. I do enjoy detailed writing, and... I don't know what it was but at some points I just felt uncomfortable. Maybe that was the author doing his job well, as I know that if I lived in japan at that time and was in that situation I'd be pretty uncomfortable, but people can write about uncomfortable subjects and not make it uncomfortable to the reader, so I guess I didn't enjoy his writing style. In fact, if I remember correctly I put this down for a while somewhere in the middle of it and then convinced myself to finish it just to be able to put it on the shelf. Of course it didn't help that I knew the basic story line from watching the movie.

The story itself was fascinating though. It covers a very interesting subject and is very much worth the read.

Flags by Maxine Trottier

This story portrayed the forced Japanese emigration during the WW2 period. Many many Japanese families were sent back to Japan because the government thought they could be used as spies, even though many of these people were born in North America.
 
The story is about a girl who goes to visit her grandmother. The next door neighbour is an older Japanese man and the girl goes over to help him with his garden every day. The garden is something she's never seen before, it has no flowers or plants, it's mostly rocks and has a pond with koi fish, which she feeds. Then one day her grandmother tells her that many Japanese people are being sent away, and she finds out that the old man is one of them. She sits with the old man watching the sun go down and promises him that she'll look after his garden for him. After a while a new couple moves in and tears up the garden, replacing it with a western style garden. The girl takes the fish and sets them free and a stone and when she gets home she starts a small rock garden of her own.
 
I thought this was a good way to relay the information in picture book form. It tells the reader what happened and lets them feel the sadness, but does it gently.